Commodities & indices · Beginner

Trading Hours And Sessions For Commodities And Indices

Indices and commodities close while the news keeps coming, and the price of that closure is a gap your stop cannot prevent.

Last reviewed 15 September 2026 by the MarketPro research desk · Editorial policy

In short

Commodities and stock indices trade on exchange schedules rather than around the clock. Index futures typically run about 23 hours a day from Sunday evening to Friday evening New York time with a daily break, while the underlying cash markets trade a much shorter session. Liquidity concentrates during cash hours, spreads widen sharply outside them, and any closure creates gap risk that a stop order cannot protect against.

What to remember

A stop is triggered, not filled, at your price. Across a 45 point weekend gap a 20 point stop becomes a 45 point loss.
An index CFD spread of 0.4 points in New York cash hours can be 2 points at 03:00 London, five times the cost for identical exposure.
The closing auction is roughly a tenth of the day's volume, so late moves often carry benchmark flow rather than information.
CME products close for an hour each afternoon, during which stops cannot trigger and the reopen is the thinnest moment of the day.
Halving size before a weekend keeps a plausible gap inside the loss you planned for.

Lesson 12 of 16 in Commodities and indices

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A 45 point Sunday gap, and the 25 points your stop did not save

An index closes Friday at 5,500. You are long one micro contract with a stop at 5,480, so 20 points of risk, which is 100 USD. Over the weekend a geopolitical headline lands. Futures reopen Sunday evening at 5,455.

Your stop was resting at 5,480 and the market never traded there. It becomes a market order at the reopen and fills at roughly 5,455, so you lose 45 points rather than 20. That is 225 USD instead of 100 USD, on a position you had sized and thought you had bounded. A stop guarantees that an order is triggered, not that it fills at your price, and across a gap it will not.

This is the practical reason trading hours matter. Commodities and indices, unlike crypto, spend part of every week closed while the world keeps generating news. The cost of that closure is gap risk, and it is paid by whoever is holding.

Cash hours and futures hours are two different clocks

Most index and commodity instruments have two schedules, and confusing them is common.

The cash session is when the underlying shares or the physical market trade. US stocks run 09:30 to 16:00 New York time, London runs 08:00 to 16:30 local, Frankfurt 09:00 to 17:30 local.
The futures session is much longer. CME equity index and commodity futures generally run from Sunday evening to Friday evening New York time, roughly 23 hours a day, with a scheduled break each afternoon.
Your broker's CFD hours are a third schedule, usually tracking the futures session for index and commodity CFDs and the cash session for single-share CFDs. Read the instrument's contract specification rather than assuming.

So a US index CFD can be open at 03:00 London time. That does not make it a good time to trade, and the reason is in the next section.

Spreads at 03:00 against spreads at 15:00

Liquidity is not evenly spread across those 23 hours. It concentrates when the underlying market is open and the participants who price it are at their desks.

A typical S&P 500 CFD spread during New York cash hours might be 0.4 points. At 03:00 London, with the US closed and Asia quiet, the same instrument can be quoted at 2 points or wider. That is five times the cost of entry and exit for identical exposure. On a strategy taking two trades a day, paying an extra 1.6 points on every round trip, the annual drag runs to hundreds of points.

The thin book has a second effect beyond the spread. With fewer resting orders, a modest market order moves price further, so slippage on stops is larger and intraday moves in the quiet hours are more prone to being reversed the moment real volume arrives. Many overnight index ranges are simply undone in the first thirty minutes of the cash session. Work out what the wider spread costs your own strategy on the profit calculator before you decide the convenience is worth it.

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The last ten minutes hold a tenth of the day

At the other end, volume clusters heavily at the open and the close. The closing auction on a major equity market routinely accounts for around a tenth of the whole day's volume in a few minutes, because index funds, ETFs and benchmark-tracking mandates all need to transact at the official closing price.

Two consequences follow. Spreads at the close are tight and fills are good, which is why many systematic strategies deliberately execute there. And price can move sharply in the final minutes on flow that carries no information at all, which catches out anyone reading it as sentiment. The same applies to the opening auction, where overnight news is absorbed into a single price and the first fifteen minutes are often the widest range of the day.

The hour the market closes every single day

CME products take a scheduled daily break in the late New York afternoon, and trading stops entirely for that hour before the next session opens. It is a small detail that produces two real problems.

Pending orders sit unfilled through it, so a stop cannot trigger during the break and a market that reopens beyond your level gaps you in exactly the way the weekend does, at a smaller scale. And the reopen is the thinnest moment of the 23-hour cycle, with the widest spreads of the day, which is a poor time to be entering anything.

The daily rollover time also marks where your broker's swap or financing charge is applied, and where the daily candle breaks on most charts. If your chart's daily bars look mismatched against someone else's, this is usually why: the platform's day boundary is set to a different time zone.

A session rule you will actually keep

Write down three things for whatever you trade and keep them where you can see them.

Your instrument's core hours in your own local time. Not New York time, not exchange time. The conversion error costs more than it should, particularly around the four annual daylight saving shifts, which fall on different dates in the US and Europe and change the gap between them for a few weeks.
The scheduled events that land while your market is closed. Asian data, overnight production announcements and weekend policy meetings all resolve into an opening price you cannot trade through.
Your rule for holding over the weekend. Either you accept gap risk and size the position smaller to allow for it, or you flatten on Friday. Both are defensible. Deciding on Friday afternoon is not.

Reducing size before a weekend is the cheapest of these fixes. If your normal risk is 1% and a weekend gap can plausibly be two or three times your stop distance, then holding at half size keeps the worst case inside a range you planned for. The trading sessions guide maps how the global clock overlaps, and the guide to how prices move explains why the news that causes gaps does not wait for an exchange to open.

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Written and reviewed by the MarketPro research desk

MarketPro is a trading-signal and trading-education app operated by Harajuku Holdings LTD (Cyprus). Our signal desk publishes and tracks every trade idea in-app, and every page here is checked against the app's live behaviour before publishing. Last reviewed 15 September 2026. How we produce signals and content · About MarketPro

FAQ

Trading Hours And Sessions For Commodities And Indices: questions

What are the trading hours for stock index futures?

CME equity index futures generally trade from Sunday evening to Friday evening New York time, roughly 23 hours each day, with a scheduled break in the late New York afternoon before the next session begins. The underlying cash index only trades during its exchange's session, which for US markets is 09:30 to 16:00 New York time. Liquidity is heavily concentrated in the cash session, so the futures being open overnight does not mean the overnight market is worth trading.

Does a stop-loss protect me over the weekend?

Only partially. A stop is an instruction to trigger an order once price reaches your level, and it guarantees execution rather than price. If the market reopens beyond your stop, the order becomes a market order and fills at the first available price, which can be far worse. If an index closes at 5,500 and reopens at 5,455, a stop at 5,480 fills near 5,455. The usual defence is to hold smaller size over closures rather than to rely on the stop.

Why are spreads wider outside normal market hours?

Because fewer participants are quoting. A spread reflects the cost of a market maker holding inventory and the depth of resting orders on either side, and both thin out when the underlying exchange is closed and the main desks are not staffed. Wider spreads mean a higher round-trip cost, and the thinner order book also means larger slippage on stops and more intraday moves that reverse once real volume arrives at the open.

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